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We saw Giuseppe Berto at a party once in a while, tall, lean, nervous and handsome, and, in our opinion, the best novelist of them all except Pavese, and Pavese is dead.

Berto's The Sky Is Red had been a small masterpiece and in its special way the best book to come out of the war.

Now he was married to a beautiful girl, had a small son, and lived in an expensive apartment and worked for the movies.

On his desk was a slowly accumulating treatment and script of The Count Of Monte Cristo.

On his bookshelves were some of the latest American novels, including Bellow's Seize The Day, but he hadn't read them ( they were sent by American publishers ) and wasn't especially interested in what the American writers were up to.

He was interested in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.

So were a lot of other people.

He was interested in Italo Svevo.

He was thinking his way into a new novel, a big one, one that people had been waiting for.

It was going to be hard going all the way because he hadn't written seriously for a while, except for a few stories, was tired of the old method of realismo he had so successfully used in The Sky Is Red.

This one was going to be different.

He had bought a little piece of property down along the coast of the hard country of Calabria that he knew so well.

He was going to do one or two more films for cash and then chuck it all, leave Rome and its intellectual cliques and money-fed life, go back to Calabria.